William Howard Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and philosophy professor. He wrote three novels, three collections of short stories, a collection of novellas, and seven volumes of essays, three of which won National Book Critics Circle Award prizes and one of which, A Temple of Texts (2006), won the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism. His 1995 novel The Tunnel received the American Book Award. His 2013 novel Middle C won the 2015 William Dean Howells Medal.
Early life and education
William Howard Gass was born on July 30, 1924, in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, a steel town, where he attended local schools. He described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities. His father had been trained as an architect but, while serving during the First World War, had sustained back injuries that forced him to take a job as a high school drafting and architectural drawing teacher. His mother was a housewife.
As a boy, Gass read anything he could get his hands on. From The Shadow to The History of the French Revolution, Gass read constantly, although there were no bookstores in the town of Warren. Later he would claim that the advent of "pocketbooks" saved his literary life. He'd save up all the money he earned or obtained and, every two weeks, head down and buy as many pocketbooks as he could afford. Even though Gass was always a reader, his father disapproved of his aspirations and often berated him for it.
He attended Ohio Wesleyan University after graduating from Warren G. Harding High School, where he did very well, except for some difficulties in mathematics, then served as an ensign in the Navy during World War II for three and a half years, a period he described as perhaps the worst of his life. He earned his A.B. magna cum laude in philosophy from Kenyon College (1947), where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. From there he entered Cornell University as a Susan Linn Fellow in Philosophy and, by 1954, had earned his PhD in that subject. While at Cornell, he studied under Max Black and, briefly, Ludwig Wittgenstein. His dissertation, "A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor", was based on his training as a philosopher of language. In graduate school, Gass read the work of Gertrude Stein, who influenced his writing.
Teaching
Gass taught at The College of Wooster for four years, Purdue University for sixteen years, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of philosophy (1969–1978) and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities (1979–1999). His colleagues there included the writers Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov (1988 Poet Laureate of the United States), and Mona Van Duyn (1992 Poet Laureate). After 2000, Gass was the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities.
Personal life
In 1952, before graduating from Cornell, he married Mary Pat O'Kelly. The marriage ended in divorce. He had two sons and a daughter with his first wife, Richard, Robert and Susan.
Gass later married architect Mary Henderson Gass, author of Parkview: A St. Louis Urban Oasis (2005). They had twin daughters, Catherine and Elizabeth Gass-Boshoven. Catherine is an artist teaching at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is a photographer for the Newberry Library.